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Early Earth Atmosphere Favourable to Life
mathinator writes "A study by researchers at the University of Waterloo indicates that Earth in its infancy probably had substantial quantities of hydrogen in its atmosphere, a surprising finding that may alter the way many scientists think about how life began on the planet. The new study indicates that up to 40 percent of the early atmosphere was hydrogen, implying a more favourable climate for the production of pre-biotic organic compounds like amino acids, and ultimately, life. The paper was authored by doctoral student Feng Tian, Prof. Owen Toon and Research Associate Alexander Pavlov of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and by Prof. Hans De Sterk of University of Waterloo's Applied Mathematics department. The paper was published in the April 7 issue of Science Express, the online edition of Science Magazine"
Poppycock.
Electricity is a theory too, and you can't prove it by holding it in your hand, but that doesn't mean the methods the scientists came up with to explain it aren't valid. Evolution is as close to a fact as anyone who holds an ancient half-history half-fiction book needs. The fact that the book itself says it's fact doesn't make it fact, and this should be obvious to anyone with all their teeth.
God may exist, but if he/she does, for all intents and purposes he set forth Evolotion and all that entails as his/her handywork, plus the mountains and mountains and mountains of corroborating evidence to prove it. The Bible is a book a group of people wrote to serve their own purposes. Convieniently, it fit their purposes for their day and age.
I doubt a God as stated in the Bible would devalue women so much as to send his son and not his daughter, instead of the reality that a man wrote the Bible ages ago when women weren't even remotely treated equally. Reality may hurt, but it's still reality.
My family prays for me, and if what they want happens they say "It could only be God" but if it doesn't, they don't say anything. Funny. They look for things to fit their dogma, and close their ears when it doesn't.
Conversely, scientists slowly and usually sheepishly turn in white-papers with their findings and their conclusions after giving it to colleagues to read over, and the community carefully takes the new information into consideration, always with the suspicious eye. Only when information, data, results has not been found by any known means to be wrong does it get elevated to the "might be true" status. Then only after many other documents corroborating it are similarly published does the original data/results get elevated to "probably true". Scientists are so ready concede incorrect results, and religious people are so ready to say they're right for no other reason than they decide they are.
Religous texts fail the moment they are put to half the scrutiny that scientists who pursue Evolution as you say as a "theory", put to it every day. Even if scraps of the texts are true, the parts concerning scientific interest fail miserably.
I'm surprised this didn't get modded down as flamebait. Maybe flamefest would be more appropriate. I mean, this article would have went without another flame war.
The whole argument was dismantled when we began to discover that complex organic molecules could form in all sorts of environments. Don't worry, Creationists aren't bound by scientific arguments. I mean, you still hear liars like Kent Hovind running around repeating the old moon dust nonsense. Once a claim has entered the Creationist's toolkit, it never leaves no matter how many times it is discredited.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Jeez who knew /. was crawling with so many anti-science anti-intellectualist nocluebies. sad. Ever think that maybe you're shot down "every time" you have pointed out your pet theory to "evolutionists" is possibly because you're dead wrong? Please cite a scientific source which says "early Earth had an oxygenating atmosphere". There are none because its preposterous. Just about all the oxygen in the atmosphere came from autotrophic organisms. ie. PLANTS!! It can only have accumulated after life appeared. The data on O2 concentration in the atmosphere of ancient earth is WELL constrained. Jeez, the arrogance of some people....
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"